At first I thought I could just change the read/write permissions like in XP. Nope.

Then I went into all the advanced settings changing privileges all over to allow full access to the files no matter which user or which group was accessing. Nope.

Thought maybe I could run Filezilla server and connect to my own machine using an FTP client with a user that has full permissions and CHMOD the files like that. Nope.

So what small, insignificant detail am I completely oblivious to that will let me change the file permissions in a way that will make xampp see the files as chmodded to anything besides 0666? This is driving me up the flippin wall.

Sure, Windows NT (XP/Vista/2003) have this permission. But most OSS software (comming from Linux), like Apache or PHP, don't understand the Windows privileges system.
--> they only know the simple file attributes like hidden or read-only.